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Who Wins the Final Four Free-For-All?

It’s not unusual on Anthony Davis dunks for opponents’ heads to barely show up at the bottom of the photo.

It’s quite possible that, as was posited on the Journal’s sports podcast earlier this week, the NCAA tournament is fundamentally upside down—that the upset-filled Total Basketball Immersion experience of the first four days are what fans really get excited about, and that the Final Four is something of an inevitable anticlimax. It’s possible, but with a pair of Final Four games looming on Saturday that also feels like a topic for another day. These are the days that make tough guy athletes weep fat tears, and a national championship run is something that can resonate for a decade. It’s quite possible that we all cared more before our respective brackets were busted, our respective alma maters eliminated, and our adopted Cinderellas were bounced from the ball by one of the four college hoops bluebloods still standing. That’s all possible, sure, but this is still the Final Four.

That rivalry and those coaches have been the focus of most coverage leading up to the game, to a mildly maddening extent. But Saturday’s tip-off should turn the focus squarely back to basketball. Which is great, but which won’t really settle anything having to do with one of the wilder rivalries in one of the nation’s more basketball-crazy states. “To put it into context, this is Super Bowl week in Kentucky,” William Reed writes in Sports Illustrated. “Even folks who only have a casual interest in hoops—yes, we do have some of those—are suddenly expressing opinions and making bets and generally acting like fools.”

It may not be as immersive as the first two days, but it’s pretty exciting all the same. For my money, this is Kentucky’s year. I haven’t enjoyed watching a team this good maybe ever, and I think that has more to do with them being great and great fun to watch than it does with my growing up at all.

Check back here all weekend for dispatches and live blogs from our team in New Orleans.

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If Kevin Love scores 31 points and grabs eight rebounds on Friday against the Boston Celtics, it will be official—he will have had the best month of any frontcourt player in the last decade and a half, at least in terms of total points and rebounds. While 31 and eight would be a tall order for most players, it has been alarmingly close to average for Love, who is averaging a robust 31.3 points and 14 rebounds in 15 March games and enjoying the best month yet of his second straight breakout season. All in all, a pretty good run for a player who is still consistently and inexplicably underrated by people whose job it is not to underrate players who can average 31 and 14 over the course of a month.

“How good?” Ryan Jones wonders at Slam. “The Tim Duncan comparison is absurd for a lot of reasons, not least being Duncan’s defensive dominance and the fact that he averaged at least 20 and 11 for nearly a decade. Kevin Love is 23. He’s in his second year as a starter. He has yet to appear in a playoff game. He has much to prove. But then, the comparison doesn’t seem as absurd as the numbers he’s putting up on a nightly basis. The numbers are as real as they are ridiculous. The same might be said of Love’s ascension: Ridiculous, and undeniably real.”

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Barring the unforeseen, Octavio Dotel won’t close games for the Detroit Tigers this year. Fantasy baseball GMs outside of deeper AL-Only leagues won’t much notice him; baseball fans outside of the AL Central probably won’t, either. But Dotel remains one of the more effective late-middle relief pitchers in baseball in his early-middle age. When he makes his first appearance for the Tigers this year, he’ll also make an idiosyncratic bit of history.

“When he signed with the Tigers this winter, it may not have been news of quite the same magnitude as it was when the Tigers signed that Prince guy,” ESPN’s Jayson Stark writes. “But it was way more historic—because it put Octavio Dotel in position to do something no player in history has ever done: Play for 13 different teams. In the major leagues. And the fact that he’s done that in only 13 years? Just makes it all the more awe-inspiring.”

Russell Branyan, who is battling back pain and fighting for a roster spot with the Yankees, has not played for quite as many teams as Dotel. If he makes it to the Bronx this year, the Yankees will be his 12th team. But his career has featured even more zigs and zags. He has been a part of 17 transactions, 15 of which have come in the last eight years. He has been on the Cleveland Indians four different times. Along the way, Branyan has developed a cult following of sorts thanks to his high-risk/high-reward approach. The slugger has 194 homers and 1,118 strikeouts in 2,934 career at-bats—and exceptionally well-decorated big league passport, but mostly for the combination of the two. “Russell Branyan might very well be the official mascot of the Baseball Prospectus era,” Sam Miller writes at Baseball Prospectus. “In the silly Us vs. Them paradigm that made 2002-2006 so much fun, Branyan was the perfect player for Us. He was always unwanted, his skills were underappreciated, he was stupid strong, and he most likely played for each of our favorite teams at some point.”

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